‘Rape Culture’ and Feminism’s Sexual Exploitation of Women

Article here. Excerpt:

'Cathy Young simply allows the accused man in this case, long since outed as Paul Nungesser, to tell the story from his own perspective, with Young verifying his facts—a novel approach to journalism, I know. The results look pretty bad. A university hearing already thoroughly examined the case using a relatively low standard, looking for a “preponderance of evidence” rather than seeking to establish Nungesser’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet they found Sulkowicz’s testimony not to be credible and cleared Nungesser of the charges. ...

The safe route for journalists is to say that maybe something really did happen and nobody can really know. But given that Nungesser was officially cleared by Columbia in a hearing that was pretty much primed to find him guilty, I think we’re entitled to say that Sulkowicz’s claim didn’t hold up.

The giveaway, really, is that she decided it would be “too draining” to pursue the case with the police—and then she literally carried a mattress around with her for more than a year and made a public spectacle of her victimhood. I suspect that the only burden she really feared was the burden of proof.
...
But you can see the standard at work here: the only people qualified to report on the issue of rape are those with the right ideological commitments who agree never to report the accused man’s side of the story. I can see why Sulkowicz might want to establish such a standard. I just can’t see why the rest of us would agree to go along with it.

As Caroline Williamson concluded in an op-ed for the Columbia student newspaper, “The mistake we’ve all made has been substituting belief in an ideal with certainty about a specific case. There was never enough evidence presented to the public to expel Nungesser from school or convict him in court, so there should not have been enough to convict him in the media.”'